Welcome to the Consumerist Archives

Thanks for visiting Consumerist.com. As of October 2017, Consumerist is no longer producing new content, but feel free to browse through our archives. Here you can find 12 years worth of articles on everything from how to avoid dodgy scams to writing an effective complaint letter. Check out some of our greatest hits below, explore the categories listed on the left-hand side of the page, or head to CR.org for ratings, reviews, and consumer news.

It’s lots of fun to spend your birthday scooping up your favorite rewards from restaurants and stores, and some are even kind enough to give you a longer deadline to redeem them. Watch out, though: as of the end of September, Starbucks shrank the redemption window from one week around your birthday to just four days.

This information comes from the fab and very specialized blog Starbucks Melody, which reports that Starbucks has narrowed the birthday reward redemption window to two days before your birthday, the day itself, and the day after.

If you’ve been waiting around for the old-school postcards to arrive in your mailbox, remember that all of Starbucks’ rewards are now digital, and have to be connected to either a smartphone app or a registered Starbucks gift card. To get the reward, you have to register an account at least 30 days before your birthday.

Why did Starbucks make the change? They say that they wanted to make the reward more about customers’ actual birthdays, and not their birth week. “The reason for the change is that these rewards are meant to be a true celebration of our customers’ birthdays. We absolutely want our customers to be aware of this and are updating our FAQs and Terms of Use,” a company spokesperson told Melody. (Giving customers less time to redeem the rewards means that fewer rewards will probably be redeemed, which is also a good reason to shrink the window.)